Roberto Bolano seduced me with “The Third Reich” — his latest novel to appear in English — but I was a willing victim, well acquainted with the Chilean author’s disturbing charms. In fact, over the past four years, I’ve been compelled to read nine novels and story collections by Bolano, including his 900-page magnum opus, “2666.”

Mathieu BourgoisRoberto Bolano

My obsession began with the English language publication of “The Savage Detectives” — a sprawling tale of poets, politics and failed promise, told in the pitch-perfect voices of 50 distinct characters. For many readers in the United States, that was the great book of 2007: a big splash that made it clear that we hadn’t been paying close enough attention to Latin-American literature, and especially not to the comet-like Bolano, who poured out a dozen books in the decade before he succumbed to a chronic liver ailment, dying at age 50 in 2003.

“The Third Reich,” newly translated by Natasha Wimmer, comes from the start of Bolano’s amazing run. He penned it in 1989, and never published the manuscript, leaving it for executors to discover among his papers.

At first, it’s hard to see why Bolano abandoned the book, which showcases both his gripping narrative powers and his skill at using unreliable first-person narrators to frame psychological truths.

Bolano casts his tale in the form of a vacation diary: one month of entries from Udo Berger, a callow young German who brings his girlfriend (and his favorite World War Two board game) to a Spanish coastal resort. The setting is perfect: a port town with a dangerous fringe, disgruntled locals and a fevered pack of holiday fun seekers, all seen through the coolly affectless prose of Berger’s diary.

Here’s how Berger begins an entry about the disappearance — and probable drowning — of a new acquaintance: “Today’s events are still confused, but I’ll try to set them down in orderly fashion so that I can perhaps discover in them something that has thus far eluded me, a difficult and possibly useless task, since there’s no remedy for what’s happened and little point in nurturing false hopes. But I have to do something to pass the time.”

Bolano sets many plot lines in motion: Will Berger’s passion for gaming undo his relationship with his girlfriend? Will he fall into the arms of the hotel’s ravishing German owner? Will he come to a bad end while drinking with local toughs and wild tourists? And why, in the end, does Berger linger in Spain past the holiday season, putting his future at risk?

As a portrait of a man drawn into a whirlpool, Bolano’s story is likely to please readers who enjoy the novels of Paul Bowles and Patricia Highsmith. Those masters of dread knew how to compel attention — and awaken sympathy — by putting their flawed, often seedy characters at risk. As brutal realists, they also saw that our greatest hazards are often those that we create for ourselves. Bolano is much the same.

Yet, for all its virtues, “The Third Reich” doesn’t rank with Bolano’s best. Among other things, it lacks an emotionally satisfying plot payoff, and unlike Bolano’s later books, its dilemmas remain the private affair of his protagonist, only schematically linked to larger social concerns. That’s a serious flaw in a novel that draws its title from a World War Two board game, and centers on a German gamer’s response to a senseless death. A few years later, Bolano would have filled in the dots, as he did in masterworks such as “Distant Star” and “By Night in Chile,” which chilled with their evocations of collective guilt, mass denial, not-so-benign forgetfulness and the perverse, almost fetishistic appeal of fascism.